WORKS

"Ichihara Art x Mix 2017"

"Dirt Restaurant" is a practice that presents soil not as an object of appreciation, but as a medium for experience. In this work, soil is treated not only as something that undergoes a geological formation process, but also as something that embodies human activities and narratives. When the artist collects soil in various locations, he interviews local residents and collects the life history and memories related to the land along with the soil. The soil thus collected is brought into the exhibition space not merely as a material, but as a bundle of relationships.

The exhibition introduces the act of "tasting," in which visitors use wine glasses to smell the soil. This act opens up a different perceptual circuit than scientific analysis or visually-centered appreciation, and shortens the distance between the soil and the body through the sense of smell. Furthermore, the process by which the soil changes over time after water is added establishes the exhibition not as a fixed, finished form, but as a place of generation and transformation.

This work demonstrates the rearrangement of memories through soil. Through the overlapping of multiple actions such as collection, storytelling, fermentation, and selection, the exhibition space functions as a temporary "restaurant," and visitors become not consumers, but participants in the memory of the land. "Dirt Restaurant" is an attempt to re-examine the relationship between matter and people, and to quietly present how the memory of a place can be shared.